Series
GVU Brown Bag Seminars
GVU Brown Bag Seminars
Permanent Link
Series Type
Event Series
Description
Associated Organization(s)
Associated Organization(s)
Organizational Unit
4 results
Publication Search Results
Now showing
1 - 4 of 4
-
ItemRepresentation of disability in children’s video games( 2021-10-28) Madej, KrystinaWhile video game accessibility for people with disability has been given serious thought and been addressed by video game developers since the early 2000s, representation of disability in video games has been less well addressed. How children’s perception of disability is established and maintained or altered through playing video games in which characters with disabilities are represented has received no attention at all. The most instrumental type of representation of disability in games should provide children with exposure to and engagement with new video game schemas that add understanding and help create meaning about the disability represented. Video games differ significantly in how they represent disability. Representation can be cosmetic, providing exposure but not gameplay utility; it can be incidental, used as a device that provides purpose for the narrative; or it can accurately represent the disability and show how the character copes with their disability. How representation is perceived by children, i.e.. the message that is received, depends on what stage a child may be in in their cognitive development, the society of which they are a part, and their exposure to disability in games previously. This talk shares a current EU research project in which nineteen games (1994-2020) with a PEGI 3 rating, and seventeen games (2004 to 2020) with a PEGI 7 rating, were reviewed and characters analyzed to consider how representation of disability maps against cognitive development and psychomotor and cognitive needs and abilities of children ages 3 to 12.
-
ItemBringing Narrative Authoring into Social Media( 2021-02-25) Madej, KrystinaWhen social media is perceived only as a vehicle for posting personal history narratives the potential for using its affordances to create literary narratives is lost. We can use social media’s speculative spaces to both create and experience a wide range of interactive and collaborative stories, both non-fiction and fiction. In 2009 The Royal Opera House used Twitter to crowd source Twitterdammerung, a collaborative venture to explore opera as a living art form and make it accessible to everyone. This inspired the Neil Gaiman book Hearts, Keys and Puppetry, a Twitter collaboration published as a BBC Audiobook, also in 2009. In 2014, Grammerly used its blog to crowd-source the book Frozen by Fire from 500 writers in 54 different countries. Crowdsourcing has become common for entertainment platforms such as Netfllix and a new generation of users has higher expectation of helping to shape online stories. High profile narrative experiments notwithstanding, the digital humanities continue to view social media most often as a vehicle for personal histories. This paper presents an ongoing social media and narrative project initiated in 2013 that encourages the broader perspective. It presents social media narratives created in 2019 by small teams of university students who were asked to engage in participatory story creation that used social media in all its affordances. Planning was through social media, content creation was through social media, and the narrative was played out through social media from Instant Messaging to Tweets, from Facebook to LinkedIn, from YouTube to Snap Chat. Students created their own non-fiction narratives (Atlanta Child Murders), explored contemporary fiction (The Handmaid’s Tale), and revisited canonical works (Romeo and Juliet) in ways that reflected their current media culture. One response to Romeo and Juliet shows the value of just such an approach, “I’ve never really connected to the story until now that I’ve seen how it plays out in apps I use every day.”
-
ItemSerious Topics in Children's Digital Games( 2020-01-16) Madej, KrystinaGames are an important form of play. While games are played by all age groups, for children, play and games are fundamental to learning and, for them, all play is serious. Serious games, which have become a prevalent game genre for adults, need not be confined to adult or adolescent audiences. Both from the perspective of serious topics and serious gameplay, older children as they head towards adolescence, and younger children as they negotiate their way through their first years of school, warrant the consideration of games developed to tackle topics that are becoming increasingly important to their health and well-being. In games, social value can only be created through a narrative a child can relate to. Whether we turn to David Winnicott on child development, Jerome Bruner on acts of meaning, or Kieran Egan on languaged learning, story dominates as the most valuable experience in the construction of a child's world and how they act within it. The added context of a personal approach, one that is culturally relevant, can create an influential avenue through which children can be provided with opportunities for gaining knowledge about problems that, while they may be national or global, are local to them – knowledge that could be critical to their well-being and survival in an increasingly hostile world. Games offer children a space that supports learning on their own. Moving from the typical to the atypical game, from simple problem solving that increases cognitive skills, to social problem solving that teaches empathy, is a shift that can happen through participation in narrative dialogue. Social value in a game can exist when the cognitive load is not in computing numbers but in the challenge of uncovering the more intriguing stories beyond the surface of coded messages. In this talk I present a case study that describes the design thinking process of a group of EU Erasmus students, each of whom brings their own cultural perspective and personal story to addressing how they would introduce children to contemporary issues, which either affect them currently, or will affect them as they grow up, through narrative in physically engaging games. A number of their final game designs are provided in outline.
-
ItemDisney Animation: Story and Technology( 2019-10-24) Madej, KrystinaWalt Disney is described variously as an American entrepreneur, a film producer, a pioneer of the American animation industry, the founder of the theme park industry. Public perception of him is of a filmmaker with an uncanny ability to create entertaining family oriented animated films and experiences. More than that Walt Disney was a visionary who believed technology should be pushed to its limits to realize stories, provide experiences, and build worlds. That a technology did not exist or was not yet ready to solve a problem was not an obstacle – his answer was always – build it. "Disney Stories: Getting to Digital" (Lee & Madej, 2012) discusses how Walt Disney and then the Walt Disney Company narratives evolved from traditional animation to computer games and online narrative experiences. In the upcoming second edition (January 2020) I look at technology as it has been used to enhance story from the first feature animation "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" to the first VR short "Cycles". This talk first provides an overview of the technological innovation that has driven the many arms of the Disney empire, most recently the animatronics for the new Star Wars worlds at Walt Disney World and Disneyland. This is followed by a presentation of Disney advances in technology made in the genre of animated films from the 1940s to today as Disney moved from the traditional methods of integrating animation and live action in "Song of the South" and later "Mary Poppins", to CGI assisted films beginning with "Tron", through many iterations to "Big Hero Six", and finally to VR and its use in shorts such as "Styles".